1. American Journal of Public Health. 1997.
Study reports the results of a 28 year follow-up study of 5,000 adults involved in the Berkeley Human Population Laboratory Scheme. Mortality for persons attending religious services once a week or more often was almost 25% lower than for persons attending religious services less frequently; for women, the mortality rate was reduce by 35%.
2. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine. 1998.
The relationship between religious activities and blood pressure was examined in a 6 year prospective study of 4,000 older adults. Among those subjects who attended religious services once a week or more and prayed once a day or more, the likelihood of diastolic hypertension was 40% lower than among those who attended services and prayed only occasionally.
3. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine. 1997. Findings suggest that persons who attend church frequently have stronger immune systems than less frequent attenders, and may help explain why both better mental and better physical health are characteristic of frequent church attenders.
4. American Journal of Psychiatry. 1998.
Found that depressed patients who had a strong intrinsic religious faith recovered over 70% faster from depression than those with less strong faith.
5. American Journal of Public Health. 1998.
In a 5 year study of 1,931 older residents of Marin County, California, people who attended religious services were 36% less likely to die during the follow up period.
6. American Journal of Psychiatry. 1990.
Reported that among 33 elderly woman hospitalised with hip fracture, greater religiousness was associated with less depression and longer walking distances at the time of hospital discharge.
7. My own somewhat amateurish bit of research. September 2002.
Scanning through the Methodist Hymns & Psalms one Sunday morning during the offering I happened to realise that Charles Wesley was 81 years old when he died. I began to wonder about the age of other hymn writers and how their ages might compare to the life expectancy of that period. So over the next few days I went through the 823 hymns in my own hymn book and discovered that the average age of all lyricists from 1600 to 1938 was 69. By researching further, I discovered that the overall average life expectancy during the same period was just 35. However, if you were to survive up to the age of fifteen then your life expectancy rose dramatically to 51. Excluding the fact that many hymn writers may have come from the better classes, it is still remarkable that this particular group of people should live, on average, eighteen years longer than was generally expected amongst the normal population of the time.
But what of so-called "distant prayer" -- often referred to as "intercessory prayer," as in Krucoff's studies?
"Intercessory prayer is prayer geared toward doing something -- interrupting a heart attack or accomplishing healing," says Krucoff, who wears numerous hats at Duke and at the local Veterans Affairs Medical Center. An associate professor of medicine in cardiology, Krucoff also directs the Ischemia Monitoring Core Laboratory and co-directs the MANTRA (Monitoring and Actualization of Noetic Teachings) prayer study project at Duke. Long-time nurse practitioner Suzanne Crater co-directs that study.
Noetic trainings? "Those are complementary therapies that do not involve tangible elements," says Krucoff. "There are no herbs, no massages, no acupressure."
The goal of prayer therapy is to accomplish healing, yet "there are a lot of questions about what healing means," Krucoff tells WebMD. "At this level of this work, there are many philosophical debates that can emerge. The basic concept is this -- if you add prayer to standard, high-tech treatment -- if you motivate a spiritual force or energy, does it actually make people better, heal faster, get out of the hospital faster, make them need fewer pills, suffer less?"
Roy L. and 150 other patients took part in MANTRA's pilot study. All suffer from acute heart disease, and all needed emergency angioplasty.
The stress of the procedure -- because it is done on patients who are awake -- has its own negative effects on the body, Krucoff tells WebMD. "The heart beats faster, beats harder, blood vessels are constricted, blood is thicker and clots more easily. All that's bad." But if an intervention could mediate that stress, it would potentially be a pretty useful adjunct for people coming in for angioplasty, he says.
In the pilot study, the patients were assigned to a control group or to touch therapy, stress relaxation, imagery, or distant prayer. A therapist came to the bedsides of patients in the touch, stress-relaxation, and imagery groups, but not to the bedsides in the control or distant-prayer groups. Like Roy, people in those two groups didn't know whether prayers were being sent their way or not.
Those early results "were very suggestive that there may be a benefit to these therapies," Krucoff tells WebMD.
Krucoff and Crater are now involved in the MANTRA trial's second phase, which will ultimately enroll 1,500 patients undergoing angioplasty at nine clinical centers around the country.
Dr Van der Does5 dismisses the effects of intercessory prayer because they would be indistinguishable empirically from the effects of clairvoyance and telepathy, which he implies are nonsense. (He presumably means not clairvoyance or telepathy, which are forms of anomalous cognition, but psychokinesis, the anomalous perturbation of distant events.) However, there is considerable evidence that neither telepathy nor psychokinesis is nonsense,6 in which case the indistinguishability between prayer and psychokinesis would not invalidate prayer.
Dr Sandweiss3 also refers dismissively to psychokinesis, apparently unaware of the evidence favoring this phenomenon. For example, in Foundations of Physics, one of physics' most prestigious journals, Radin and Nelson7 reported a meta-analysis of 832 studies from 68 investigators that involved the distant influence of human consciousness on microelectronic systems.
They found the results to be "robust and repeatable." In their opinion, "Unless critics want to allege wholesale collusion among more than sixty experimenters or suggest a methodological artifact common to . . . hundred[s of] experiments conducted over nearly three decades, there is no escaping the conclusion that [these] effects are indeed possible."
i cant find any of dosseys shit, but he found a positive effect of prayer, and positive effect of distant prayer on health.the study was repeated twice if im not mistaken, once and duke.
